At the Forest of Thoughts we’ve long been fans of The Ignobel Awards – indeed, we were fans before the Forest of Thoughts even existed (though the Ignobels certainly planted a few seeds). If you’re new to the awards, as a brief summary, they were created to reward scientific discoveries that, ‘First make you laugh, then make you think.’

Here’s a trailer for the awards:

And we’re very excited to report that we’ll be streaming the awards ceremony live at 12.30am GMT (if you’re elsewhere, see the world clock) on 29th September.

OK, it’s a bit of a late night but it’s well worth it. As a taster, last year’s Engineering Prize went to Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter; the Peace Prize went to Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain; and the Biology Prize went to Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats (and demonstrating it prolongs copulation time). Oh, and the prizes are presented by Nobel Prize Winners. This makes our inner geek go mushy.

Tickets to the event are sold out so the only way to see the show is to watch it online. So make a date and get watching! We hope you enjoy the Igs as much as we do.

NB: if you play the live stream before about 12.10am tomorrow, the video will appear to buffer indefinitely until the video stream goes live, so don’t waste your time trying to watch until then. You won’t get access to any exciting behind-the-scenes footage.